This section provides background information related to the present disclosure which is not necessarily prior art.
Active and inactive domestic solid waste landfills in the United States require the installation of systems to control and capture methane produced by the anaerobic processes breaking down the waste. Safety, gas capture for energy use, and greenhouse gas control because methane has 25 times the greenhouse gas impact of CO2, are some of the reasons these systems are installed. Additionally, regulations govern methane gas emissions for air pollution and safety reasons. While some landfills employ passive flare systems to burn off the methane, the present trend is to employ controlled systems that use a vacuum pump, piping and wells to draw the methane to a central location at the landfill site for use generating electricity or for gas recovery.
Data is currently collected from the numerous extraction points such as gas well heads, often as frequently as once a week. A typical landfill may consist of approximately 50 to several hundred wells and well heads. The frequency of data collection, combined with the number of data collection points, creates a large, multivariate data set that grows over time. This data known as landfill gas (LFG) data is typically stored in spreadsheets or enterprise level environmental databases. Current data use focuses on flagging exceedences, some charting and some data trend mapping as related to GPS location of the well points. Control decisions at each well head are primarily based on fixed “rules” and tend not to utilize LFG data from historical data sets. Additionally, the analysis of historical data sets for time and space trends and relationships are not used to create control modification recommendations such as positioning of control valves at the well heads.